Hessian State Attorney General Fritz Bauer announced here today that testimony to be given in Israel by Adolf Eichmann may affect war crimes charges made here against Dr. Hans Globke, right-hand man to Chancellor Konrad Adenauer.
Dr. Bauer tied the Globke case to Eichmann today as he opened a formal criminal investigation into the accusations being leveled against the Adenauer aide. Dr. Globke, who is State Secretary, and the man who runs Chancellor Adenauer’s office, is being accused of having aided Eichmann in 1943 in the deportation of 10, 000 Jews from Salonika, Greece, to Nazi extermination camps.
“Eichmann’s testimony about the deportation of those 10, 000 Jewish men, women and children from Salonika would very much affect the Globke investigation, ” Dr. Bauer said. Eichmann, chief Nazi director in the murder of 6, 000, 000 European Jews, is expected to go on trial in Israel in March for his war crimes against the Jewish people.
Another witness being called in his probe in the Globke case, Dr. Bauer said, is Prof. Karl Burkhardt, a Swiss citizen. As representative for the International Red Cross, Dr. Burkhardt, negotiated with the Nazi regime for the transfer of the 10, 000 Salonika Jews to Palestine. Those negotiations were unsuccessful and the Jews were deported to death camps instead.
A third witness being sought by Dr. Bauer is a former officer in the SS, the Hitler Elite Guard in which Eichmann was a colonel. That officer, according to the Attorney General, was in charge of the deportation of Jews from northern Greece. Refusing to reveal the man’s name, “for tactical reasons,” Dr. Bauer said the man had been last known to be living in Syria but had disappeared after the arrest of Eichmann last summer.
The Globke case took still another turn today when the German District Court at Wiesbaden rejected an application from the State Secretary for the confiscation of the latest issue of the influential weekly magazine, Welt Bild. The magazine printed an article charging that Dr. Globke had not only written the official, Nazi legal commentary on the Nuremberg anti-Semitic laws passed by the Reichstag in 1935, but had helped draft those laws.
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